The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette KowalMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
It's no surprise this novel scooped up all the major awards this year. It's a solid book by a veteran author in a year of many good first efforts and less great books from the usual suspects. It showcases how SF can illuminate current events, and has enough hard SF in it to be satisfying to a technical fan. Is it the best thing I ever read? Not quite. As much as this book sprawls (covering race, gender, and religious discrimination, as well as science denial) it ends up missing a lot that's important in alternate histories. The tension comes entirely from the aforementioned social context issues, and while that's real, in the outside world those issues intertwine with geopolitics and personal conflict. We get none of the latter. The result for me is that Elma's story is compelling (I eagerly read it all the way through) but not really challenging in any way. Stetson Parker, overbearing white-guy test pilot, is about the only character with any real complexity in the book.
Still, I liked it, and it's an easy book to like.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment